American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (11 page)

Wilson promised to help get him an assignment at a major magazine. Perhaps at
The Saturday Evening Post
, where he had published the first of his many “Tad Sheldon, Boy Scout” stories. Wilson also wrote pieces of reportage and he mentioned to Rockwell that he was planning a trip down to Panama, to report on the construction of the canal and the thousands of men involved in the effort. The previous year, his article “Panama, City of Madmen,” had appeared in
Lippincott’s.
14
Wilson suggested that Rockwell come along on his next Panamanian expedition and do the illustrations. Rockwell acquired a pith helmet and a pair of leather sandals, imagined his first ship journey, counted the days until their departure.

But then one day he visited the hotel on Broadway where Wilson had been staying; the writer had checked out and left no forwarding address. “I was crushed,” Rockwell recalled. “I went home and sat in my empty studio amidst the litter of my tropic gear. My mind was empty. Everything—all my dreams of becoming a great illustrator, of working for the big magazines—shattered, lost.

“I guess I came as near to having a nervous breakdown as I ever have. I couldn’t work. Or sleep. Or eat. Or go out anywhere. I wouldn’t talk about it. I just sat in my studio, staring at the pigeons strutting on the ledge outside my window.

“Finally, my father sent me away to the mountains for a month,” Rockwell recalled. He stayed in a room on the Jessup farm where his family had summered long ago, up in Warwick, New York. “I took long walks through the snowy countryside,” Rockwell recalled, “trying not to think.”

He never forgave Wilson for leaving him stranded. For leaving him to continue his quest by himself, in the unforgiving city. Stranded like a boy in one of those shipwreck stories in
Boys’ Life
, but without the resourcefulness to know what to do next.

FIVE

NEW ROCHELLE, ART CAPITAL OF THE WORLD

(1914 TO 1916)

It is frequently the case that an artist who moves to a new city pursues a new direction in his work. A stay in Paris has altered the lives of so many artists it sometimes seems as if a whiff of French air is enough to turn any provincial into a modernist. Think of New Rochelle, New York, as Norman Rockwell’s Paris.

Early in 1914, Nancy Rockwell decided to leave Manhattan and move the family into Brown Lodge, a rooming house in New Rochelle. It was listed in directories as a hotel and she considered the arrangement more prestigious than having her own house. Undine Spragg, the spoiled heroine of Edith Wharton’s
Custom of the Country
, felt her family “could not hope to get on while they ‘kept house’—all the fashionable people they knew boarded or lived in hotels.” The novel was published in 1913, just a year before the Rockwells moved into their own hotel, or rather into Brown Lodge, a white-shingled house on a quiet street. It was just around the corner from Main Street, where trolleycars clanged and fine shops stretched on block after block. You could buy a player piano at Baumer, have your parasol repaired at the Umbrella Hospital, or see the latest Charlie Chaplin movie at the Loew’s Theatre.

After the ordeals of the previous months—her son’s aborted Panama trip and all the rest—Mrs. Rockwell thought that New Rochelle would be an ideal place to live. For starters, it was home to about a dozen illustrators of some renown, men who contributed to magazines that everyone read, like
Collier’s
and
The Saturday Evening Post
. Its origin as an art colony went back to 1890, when Frederic Remington, the legendary painter of the Old West, gave up his apartment in New York City and purchased an estate in New Rochelle. Many of his paintings of the untrammeled frontier were done not in Wyoming or Montana but at his atelier on Webster Avenue, where he kept horses and became a suburban cowboy.

Rockwell arrived in New Rochelle just in time to participate in a show that was quite prestigious—the first annual juried exhibition of the New Rochelle Art Association. It opened in May 1914 in the fine arts room at the brand-new New Rochelle Public Library, a handsome pale-brick structure that owed its existence to a grant from Andrew Carnegie. At age twenty, Rockwell was the youngest artist in the show.
1
He exhibited two works, which were identified on a checklist, rather unhelpfully, as “Illustration” and “Sketch.” He was still Norman P. Rockwell, an artist who used his middle initial when he signed his name. Rockwell’s coexhibitors at the library were an illustrious (and initial-heavy) bunch, including Frederic S. Remington, who by then had died; J. C. Leyendecker; Frank X. Leyendecker; and C. Coles Phillips.

Of all the artists in New Rochelle, Rockwell was the most taken with Joseph Leyendecker (pronounced LINE-decker), the star cover artist for
The Saturday Evening Post.
Today he is remembered as the creator of the Arrow Collar Man, a handsome, square-jawed figure and the first preppy in American advertising. But in his time, Leyendecker was beloved for his
Post
covers. A German immigrant and master draftsman, he used a crisp, spiky Northern European line to portray scenes of American life, many of them tied to national holidays. His covers might show a New Year’s baby bestriding a globe, a pilgrim hunting a Thanksgiving turkey, or elves pummeling Santa with snowballs.

In contrast to most other illustrators, who specialized in pretty-girl covers, Leyendecker favored genre scenes. “Girls’ heads are being overdone,” he said in a rare interview that appeared in
The Sun
in 1913.
2
“The simple reason is that composition involves difficulties which many illustrators prefer to avoid. In painting a girl’s head, they have only one problem to face: to make it as beautiful as possible. In drawing pictures that require composition, it is necessary to practice control and eliminate everything that is superfluous.”

In dismissing the fashion for girls’ heads, Leyendecker was presumably dismissing his fellow illustrators at
The Saturday Evening Post.
So many covers from that period show bust-length portraits of women with powder-white skin and beet-red color on their cheeks. They peer out from beneath the wide, tilted brims of fashionable hats. Their gaze tends to be dramatic, perhaps in emulation of the new silent film stars. If they are engaged in an activity, it is likely to be one that requires little in the way of physical exertion, such as admiring a dove or a parakeet.

But perhaps the fashion for “girls’ heads,” as Leyendecker called them, was winding down. “People are now demanding pictures that have some larger meaning,” he insisted, “illustrations with an idea behind them and humor whenever possible.”

Both Leyendecker and his artist-brother Frank X. Leyendecker were homosexual and, to shield themselves from discrimination, concealed their sexual identity not only from their readers but from their editors as well. They lived with their father and their sister, Augusta, in a Renaissance-style chateau they had just built on Mt. Tom Road, on the southern edge of New Rochelle. Rockwell often wondered about the lives unfolding behind the iron fence that rimmed their estate. Walking along Mt. Tom Road on evening strolls with his parents, he would pause in front of the house and glance up at the lighted windows, where a figure might slip into view.

Rockwell worshiped Leyendecker’s covers and considered him the single best illustrator in the country. He shared with Leyendecker a love of narrative illustration, as well as an impatience with girls’ heads. But several years would pass before Rockwell befriended Leyendecker. For now he simply watched him from afar. In the morning, walking to his studio, he sometimes noticed the brothers at the New Rochelle train station, on the way to their studios in New York City. There they were, Joe and Frank, emerging from their limousine or standing on the platform in their matching blue blazers and white flannel slacks.

*   *   *

As much as Leyendecker, the other illustrators who lived in New Rochelle owed their prosperity to the “slicks,” as the new general interest magazines were known. They included Orson Lowell, Edward Penfield (the father of the American poster), and Fred Dana Marsh (the father of the social-realist painter Reginald Marsh). With his tripartite name, Marsh was sometimes confused with Charles Dana Gibson, who was the most famous of all. Gibson was the creator of the ubiquitous Gibson Girl, that fashionable belle with pointy breasts and an hourglass waistline and a tremendous amount of long, wavy hair that is usually pinned up in what was called a pompadour; it can put you in mind of a robin’s nest or swirls of soft ice cream. In her heyday, she was viewed as an icon of female independence, a woman willing to express an opinion or have a drink without parental consent.

The illustrator Charles Dana Gibson specialized in images of busty women with big hair.

Coles Phillips created another female icon: the Fade-Away Girl, a tall figure with shapely legs who derives her singularity from sophisticated visual tricks. Swatches of her dress are cut away, exposing the background of the composition, which in turn becomes an integral part of the dress. Your eye fills in the presumed outlines. The effect is striking, and turns every housewife into a Houdini equipped with the ability to appear, disappear, and reappear in the clean, rectangular space of a magazine cover.

Compared to his fellow illustrators in New Rochelle, symbols of success who lived in Tudor mansions overlooking the Long Island Sound or rolling woodlands in the Wykagyl neighborhood north of downtown, Rockwell lived modestly. He did not own a tract of land. He did not employ servants. Rather, he was still residing with his penny-scrimping parents and his brother, Jarvis, at Brown Lodge, in the city’s business district.

On weekday mornings, Rockwell’s father and brother commuted by train into New York City, to their respective jobs in Lower Manhattan. Rockwell did not have to venture that far. He could walk from Brown Lodge to the studio he rented at 78 North Avenue. He usually started his work day by drinking a bottle of Coca-Cola, which helped him wake up, and mulling over the painting in progress on his easel. He would try to figure out which part of it didn’t work and he always found something. This provided him with an entry point back into the painting and opened up a space of concentration into which he could disappear for hours.

He was separated from the other illustrators in New Rochelle not only by his youth and his inexperience, but by his lack of interest in their notion of glamour, their sense of the things that make life worthwhile. For starters, he did not care for golf and could not understand how certain men played round after round at the Wykagyl Country Club. Most of them were married and their wives and girlfriends were themselves somewhat celebrated and ogled—they were the women who had modeled for the Gibson Girl and the Fade-Away Girl and all the other new kinds of modern girls.

Rockwell, by contrast, continued to work seven days a week and to produce illustrations of boys. Skating boys and brawling boys and boys sitting around the proverbial campfire. He had already drawn more baseball diamonds than he could count. Ditto for shipwrecks and deserted islands. In the two years since he had left the Art Students League, he had come to know the art editors at various magazines and secured a steady influx of assignments. His work for
Boys’ Life
led to assignments from other children’s magazines, such as
St. Nicholas
and
The Youth’s Companion
, and though the magazines were competing for junior subscribers, no one stopped Rockwell from publishing his work in all of them.

The now-forgotten
Youth’s Companion
, a weekly priced at seven cents an issue, had the largest circulation of the children’s magazines. It was published in Boston, by Perry Mason & Co. (from which the television attorney derived his name).
St. Nicholas
, by contrast
,
a New York–based monthly priced at a relatively steep twenty-five cents, continues to be called the best children’s magazine ever. Published by Century Company, it was the little person’s version of
The Century Magazine
, a mix of literature and beautifully drawn illustrations in which Rockwell along with the rest of his generation gained his first excited glimpse of pictures by Howard Pyle and Maxfield Parrish.